In wireless network systems that use relay stations (e.g., such as those described by the IEEE standard 802.16j or m), a single base station (BS) may communicate separately with multiple relay stations (RS), each of which may then communicate separately with one or more subscriber stations (SS), rather than having a direct communication between the BS and a given SS. The allocation of communication resources in these networks is typically very structured: one time period is devoted to transmissions from the BS to the RS's, another time period devoted to transmissions from the RS's to the SS's, another to transmissions from the SS's to the RS's, and another to transmissions from the RS's to the BS. In a network using time domain sharing, all the downlink transmissions from the BS to the RS's are distributed in time, with communication between the BS and only a single RS possible at any given time. This means that all but one of the RS's will be idle at any given time during this period. A similar problem occurs during uplink, when only one RS at a time may transmit to the BS, while the other RS's are idle until it is their turn to transmit. To further compound the problem, each RS cannot listen or transmit to the BS when it is communicating with it's own SS's. A similar problem occurs in networks using frequency domain sharing, except that multiple frequencies are shared by the RS's instead of multiple time slots during any given period, and some of those frequencies are idle for much of the time during a given time period due to this highly structured allocation of the frequencies. All this idle time/frequencies is a waste of potential communication resources within the network.